Natural sunlight provides energy to many biological organisms. For example, plants, including algae, use light in photosynthesis processes to produce sugar and oxygen.
Often times, it is desirable to add additional, artificial light to biological material to further facilitate the growth of the material. For example, incandescent, fluorescent, or a combination of such light is often applied to plants, where natural sunlight is unavailable or insufficient for the desired growth. Although such lights work relatively well in certain applications, incandescent and fluorescent lights often have set wavelengths of emitted lights, and the lights are relatively inefficient at converting energy (e.g., electricity) into light. Accordingly, improved systems and methods for providing light to biological material are desired.
One area of particular interest in which biological material, such as algae, is used and where application of artificial light may be particularly desirable is in bioreactors, which use biological material to convert COx (typically CO2) to maintainable carbon and oxygen.
Carbon maintenance and carbon sequestration are desirable for several reasons. For example, global warming and other environmental changes are thought to be affected by the increased amount of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrogen oxides (NiOx) and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Thus, it is thought that such environmental changes can be reduced and/or reversed by reducing emission of greenhouse gasses, and in particular, carbon-based gasses.
Fossil fuel power plants, such as coal plants, are thought to generate a substantial portion of the greenhouse gas emission. Thus, considerable effort has been made to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from such plants. Increasing fossil-fuel plant efficiency, reducing use of fossil-fuel plants, using fuels with less carbon in power plants are some of the approaches used to reduce carbon emissions. However, as the world population increases and demand for energy increases, the overall emission from fossil-fuel plants is likely to increase. Thus, systems, methods, and devices, which reduce overall carbon emission and other harmful gasses, e.g., from fossil fuel plants, and/or that make use of such gasses are desirable.